Oysters raised in the San Francisco Bay? An interview with historian Matthew Booker

Hills of old oyster shells at Drakes Bay Oyster Farm in Inverness on June 30th 2014. Photo Sam Wolson/The Chronicle

>To celebrate the beginning of fall, we are christening this first week of September as Oyster Week here on Inside Scoop. We’ll explore the history of oysters in the Bay Area, as well as our favorite stops, both old and new — and a lot more. Follow along with the ongoing coverage here.

Especially given the surge of new-age oyster bars, we may think of Northern California oysters as a newish, boutique industry, but oyster shoals once rimmed the San Francisco Bay. From the 1870s to the 1910s, San Franciscans gorged themselves on local oysters. However, the story of oyster farming in this region is a far different one than you’d think — California’s industry produced East Coast virginica oysters “finished” in local waters.

Matthew Booker, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, became fascinated by this lost semi-locavore tradition. Book devoted a chapter of his 2013 book Down by the Bay: San Francisco’s History Between the Tides to the San Francisco Bay Area oyster industry’s rise and fall.

Here are excerpts from our interview last week:

JK: Why did people stop eating Olympia oysters, the Pacific Coast’s native oyster? Did they overfish the shoals, or did they simply prefer the flavor of East Coast oysters?

Matthew Booker: I think it’s Mark Twain who calls the native oyster of the Pacific Coast a “poor little insipid thing.” He’s got that Southern and Eastern bias toward bigger, more flavorful virginicas. You can see Olympic oyster shoals at China Camp State Park. They’re maybe the size of a man’s thumb. That’s a lot of work to shuck.

The Atlantic oyster was first shipped across the country by train in 1869 — some of the first intercontinental trains.

They traveled in poorly refrigerated or non-refrigerated cars. You and I think oysters need refrigeration. Our paranoia is about getting sick at a restaurant because the cooks didn’t refrigerate the oysters properly. In the 19th century, oysters were probably the only food that actually could make that journey–definitely the only meat.

Oysters have this phenomenal ability to close down every time the tide goes out. They go into suspended animation, and can do it for quite a while. People figured out in Roman times that you can keep oysters alive if you give them some water – you could ship them in barrels in winter time as long as the water didn’t freeze solid. These [first shipments of] oysters, adult oysters, were a luxury food, sold for huge amount of money. That inspired local capitalists to hook up with companies as far east as Minneapolis. They would ship Atlantic oysters to Chicago and Minnesota.

They expanded to the San Francisco Bay as an aquacultural destination. It’s more efficient to send baby oysters cross-country at 20,000 to 50,000 a barrel. They planted them in the bay as seeds, and grew them to maturity. The bay oysters grew faster than New York or Chesapeake Bay oysters.

You take these baby oysters, and you send them to this feed lot off the sewers off San Mateo to feed on all that goop in the water. Back then, the bay was dirtier and richer with human and animal waste. This was all pre-sewage treatment. I speculate that the bay was even richer than it is now. Oysters don’t have any problem with that. They’re OK with a remarkably foul environment.

The trouble is that anything in the water will go into the oyster. If you have typhoid and you have diarrhea and that goes into the bay. People would freak out about that — there’s a series of 19th century food panics — and that is why we have sewage treatment in our cities. People treated the water because they were eating out of the water.

I’ve read that the native oyster beds were destroyed because the bay filled up with six feet of sediment from gold mining operations.

My take on that is that the maximum amount the seabed was raised was a meter, and that would have been in SuisunBay and San Pablo. By the time you get down to San Jose, it’s a matter of inches. Nevertheless, that’s a remarkable transformation of the benthic environment, meaning the bottom of the bay.

By 1862, there are no more guys with pans up in the gold mines. It had become a massive massive industry. They filled all the rivers up with “slickins,” or mining debris. Mud. Sand. Rock.

In 1862, they had an unbelievable winter. They received 20 inches of rain just in January. All that debris had filled up the river channels, and when the snow melt and rain arrived, it didn’t have anywhere to go. It comes out of the rivers, floods the state capitol up to the second floor, creates a 200-mile-long lake in the central valley, comes out of every riverbed. By the time it gets to the bay at the CarquinezStrait, it’s a lake of water. For weeks the San Francisco system is 100% freshwater. It even pushes out the Golden Gate. There are all these apocryphal stories of drinking from the ocean five miles offshore. That episode deposited mud in the bay. One ecologist said it was like a system reset – afterward, you have this new bay. If you go back 100,000 years, you’ll probably find similar events, but in modern history, I don’t think there’s anything like it.

That’s 1862. The East Coast oysters show up in 1869. It was really good timing. [Oyster farming] quickly becomes a major thing. As long as the railroad rates allow it and the bay and the eastern estuaries permit it, oysters become the biggest fishery on the Pacific Coast by value — not by volume, which would be salmon or tuna. By the piece, oysters are really much more expensive in the San Francisco Bay Area than the east, even though they’re expensive.
So were oysters a luxury food?

They’re an everybody food. Oysters are still cheaper than beef. They’re eaten by everybody at every economic level.

The thing about oysters into the 1910s in San Francisco, they were not for foodies. They were the Big Mac of the 19th century. And they were a hell of a lot better for everybody, including the environment, than Big Macs. They were grown in the city. They were a creature that transformed waste into protein. They were delicious. An amazing species. I’m not talking about something natural. This is not nature’s bounty. I’m talking out human beings intervening in a natural system to make it better.

So what happened to San Francisco Bay oyster industry?

By 1910 it was almost depleted. The industry starts dying in the 1910s, and in the 1930s, the farmers lift all their remaining oysters and move them to Tomales Bay.

Why did it die?

This is a big question, and there’s not an easy answer. The biggest [reason that people cited] might be pollution. But what did they mean by pollution? In the 19th century, most of the pollution was biological waste, which was awesome for oysters. They love biological waste up to a certain point. If there’s no oxygen that becomes a problem. But that could never happen in the bay.

Why would growers at the time blame pollution? This may be the sign that chemical industries are starting to have an impact. We get a series of major changes in the bay in the 1910s and 1920s, where you get the first refineries in California. There’s a pipeline from the Kern County fields. There’s big smelter in Shelby. There’s a lot of nasty stuff that’s more like what we could call toxins.

But [I also think] the oystermen undercut themselves. They built an industry on oysters as a cheap meat, the ground beef of their time. That’s a fragile place to be. They were dependent on railroad rates, which is terrible. The Eastern estuaries were getting really stressed [by toxins]. People also commented that oysters weren’t growing well — one year people said that the oysters were shriveling up. <

There’s also a big drought in the early 20th century that has farmers in the Delta pumping the hell out of the groundwater, so the salt-water line moves all the way up to Sacramento. The oysters are really stressed. There’s some guesswork out there, but it is pretty clear that for reasons that are economic and cultural, maybe people stopped wanting to eat oysters. They freak out about the danger. Canned food comes on heavy in those years.

Maybe there’s also the factor of shifting demographics. When you and I grew up, we remember when white people started eating sushi. We also remember people eating pork and beans in cans. I don’t give my kids pork and beans. Those kinds of shifts in taste happened. Maybe that happens in the 1910s. The past is not this big static thing.